See P. XX A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Mutant City Blues focuses on a standard-sized player group of 3 to 6 people. This lends itself to the ensemble style play of a serialized procedural show like NCIS, CSI, or Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. If your player group consists of two […]
Category Archives: Mutant City Blues
A while back we learned of the vials of supposedly destroyed smallpox virus that turned up in a laboratory storage room in Bethesda, Maryland. Luckily, no one was exposed to the deadly disease, allowing us to guiltlessly mine the incident for scenario inspiration. How you might use it depends on the game you’re currently running: […]
Given the persistent weirdness of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, it should come as no surprise that they were the first major sports administration to permit the use of mutant powers in professional competition. In the DNA-twisted future of Mutant City Blues, only one thing has changed about the world’s love of football: America now […]
A Calgary dentist who bought John Lennon’s tooth at auction says that he looks forward to cloning him in the near future. After finding a jurisdiction with loose bio-ethical regulation, he intends to raise the child in a music-friendly environment—though without exposure to drugs and cigarettes. Rip this story from the headlines for Mutant City […]
Rewatching Zodiac recently, I was struck by the desire to see David Fincher similarly tackle the Mothman incidents of 1966-1967. This is no swipe at Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies, which I quite like for the way it evokes the enveloping paranoia of paranormal inquiry. It does, however, impose a cinematic structure and sense of […]
Where Mutant City Blues nerdtropes the police procedural by mashing it up with the superhero genre, the new NBC series Grimm does the same thing with a dose of urban fantasy. In the premise-establishing first episode, police detective Nick Burckhardt discovers that he’s a hereditary fighter of evil creatures obliquely referenced in fairy tales. With […]
A positive review of Mutant City Blues embedded in a quirky overview of GenCon in the 2gms1mic podcast. Nicky Helmkamp understands the central point of GUMSHOE, and loves the setting. Warning, there is invective, but the enthusiastic kind.
The Stir Crazy Killing The Mutant City Blues Competition The MCB competition is now over, and you can find the solution and winners here. You can still try it out, of course! Contest Intro The phone rings at the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit—or HC, as cops like you call it. As the next officer in […]
It’s not just The Esoterrorists that urges you to reconfigure real-life mysteries by ripping tales from the headlines. With Mutant City Blues undergoing a resurgence of interest lately, I figured I’d start swapping in case ideas for the Heightened Crimes Investigative Unit as well. Japan’s strict limitations on organ donation have created a thriving black […]
New art from Pascal Quidault for the forthcoming Brief Cases, a set of three short adventures for Mutant City Blues.